The most lurid news story to come out of Berkeley, California, in the past few years was the tale of two teenage sisters brought to town from their home in rural India by a wealthy, middle-aged Berkeley landlord, also of Indian origin, to provide him with cheap labor and forced sex. The story broke on Thanksgiving Day, 1999, after the girls had fallen unconscious from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning in one of the landlord’s apartments. The younger sister, aged fifteen, survived. Her seventeen-year-old sibling died. “If it can happen here,” said American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Jayashri Srikantiah, “it can happen anywhere.”

In fact, it is happening everywhere. Not just sex slavery, but the larger phenomenon that sex slavery exemplifies in the extreme: activities formerly undertaken by first world women in their homes for free-keeping house, caring for dependents, having sex with a man-are increasingly being performed by third world women for a price, with unsettling effects on both servants and those they serve. This change, profound and vast, involves tens of millions of people. Yet it has remained largely hidden from the public, reported only intermittently by the mainstream media, and then usually as a horror story such as the one sketched above, in which third world female migrants appear as isolated victims.

Telling the real story in the name of feminist solidarity is the stated aim of Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, a collection of sixteen essays by fifteen authors, including the volume’s editors, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild. The “essential first step,” say the editors in their Introduction, is “to bring the world’s most invisible women into the light” and to show that they are “strivers as well as victims, wives and mothers as well as workers-sisters, in other words, with whom we in the First World may someday define a common agenda.” The way to make that demonstration, say Ehrenreich and Hochschild, is to approach third world female migrants as participants in “the new economy,” a.k.a. globalization.

Such an approach further challenges popular perception. The women featured in advertisements for the new economy, familiar to American television viewers and magazine readers, are neither nannies nor maids, and certainly not “sex workers,” but stylish executives wielding credit cards and cell phones as they take in the view from a luxury hotel room or run to catch a plane or taxi. In the very different reality disclosed in this book, globalization also involves the movement o...

In a scene from HBO’s The Deuce, streetwalker Ruby presents an officer with a property voucher to avoid arrest. Courtesy of HBO.

The Kurds

[W]hen we refer to all Kurdish fighters synonymously, we simply blur the fact that they have very different politics. . . right now, yes, the people are facing the Islamic State threat, so it’s very important to have a unified focus. But the truth is, ideologically and politically these are very, very different systems. Actually almost opposite to each other. —Dilar Dirik, “Rojava vs. the World,” February 2015

The Kurds, who share ethnic and cultural similarities with Iranians and are mostly Muslim by religion (largely Sunni but with many minorities), have long struggled for self-determination. After World War I, their lands were divided up between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. In Iran, though there have been small separatist movements, Kurds are mostly subjected to the same repressive treatment as everyone else (though they also face Persian and Shi’ite chauvinism, and a number of Kurdish political prisoners were recently executed). The situation is worse in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, where the Kurds are a minority people subjected to ethnically targeted violations of human rights.

Iraq: In 1986–89, Saddam Hussein conducted a genocidal campaign in which tens of thousands were murdered and thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed, including by bombing and chemical warfare. After the first Gulf War, the UN sought to establish a safe haven in parts of Kurdistan, and the United States and UK set up a no-fly zone. In 2003, the Kurdish peshmerga sided with the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam Hussein. In 2005, after a long struggle with Baghdad, the Iraqi Kurds won constitutional recognition of their autonomous region, and the Kurdistan Regional Government has since signed oil contracts with a number of Western oil companies as well as with Turkey. Iraqi Kurdistan has two main political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), both clan-based and patriarchal.

Turkey: For much of its modern history, Turkey has pursued a policy of forced assimilation towards its minority peoples; this policy is particularly stringent in the case of the Kurds—until recently referred to as the “mountain Turks”—who make up 20 percent of the total population. The policy has included forced population transfers; a ban on use of the Kurdish language, costume, music, festivals, and names; and extreme repression of any attempt at resistance. Large revolts were suppressed in 1925, 1930, and 1938, and the repression escalated with the formation of the PKK as a national liberation party, resulting in civil war in the Kurdish region from 1984 to 1999.

Syria: Kurds make up perhaps 15 percent of the population and live mostly in the northeastern part of Syria. In 1962, after Syria was declared an Arab republic, a large number of Kurds were stripped of their citizenship and declared aliens, which made it impossible for them to get an education, jobs, or any public benefits. Their land was given to Arabs. The PYD was founded in 2003 and immediately banned; its members were jailed and murdered, and a Kurdish uprising in Qamishli was met with severe military violence by the regime. When the uprising against Bashar al Assad began as part of the Arab Spring, Kurds participated, but after 2012, when they captured Kobani from the Syrian army, they withdrew most of their energy from the war against Assad in order to set up a liberated area. For this reason, some other parts of the Syrian resistance consider them Assad’s allies. The Kurds in turn cite examples of discrimination against them within the opposition.